377: Unlock Your Mind: How Your Strongest Thoughts Shape Your Reality

The Art of Living Big | Subconscious | NLP | Mindset

In this episode of The Art of Living Big, host Betsy Pake reflects on the podcast’s 8th anniversary and her journey towards personal and professional growth. She discusses her struggles with visibility and the unconscious patterns that have held her back, despite her desire to share her message more broadly. Betsy emphasizes the importance of understanding and reprogramming these unconscious thoughts, often through methods like hypnosis and coaching. She shares her strategies for overcoming these barriers, including working with top mindset coaches and utilizing hypnosis apps. The episode highlights the notion that life moves in the direction of our strongest thoughts, whether conscious or unconscious, and encourages you to address their own limiting patterns.

Transcription:

Welcome to the Art of Living Big podcast. My name is Betsy Pake . I’m an author, a speaker, and a trainer of NLP and hypnotherapy. And I’m focused on helping you understand and design your life with the power of the subconscious. This podcast is designed to help you think differently about what could be possible for your life. Now, let’s go live big. Hello. Welcome to the art of Living big.

Betsy [00:00:35]:
Today, today marks our 8th anniversary. So I have been doing this show for eight years now. If you’ve been here for a little while or maybe been here for the whole while, then, you know, I have not been like the most consistent over this past year as life has gotten really crazy. And in fact, I’m going to talk about that just a little bit. But we are, we are back on track and we are starting our 8th year, which is so wild to me. It’s funny because when I look back at when I started the very, you know, recorded those very first episodes, I was living in my old house, which if you’ve been here for a little while, you’ll remember I lived in that house in the suburbs. And then we sold it. We moved to an apartment, which I thought we would live in for like a year.

Betsy [00:01:22]:
And it ended up being like two and a half years before we found our house and moved into our house. So three different locations I have lived since that. And it feels like, oh, God, like I just another lifetime ago. At that time, I don’t think it had been very long since I had sold my crossfit gym. So I had just sold the gym, which was really kind of traumatic for lots of reasons. And I was in a space where I was like, I know that there’s something more for me, right? Something new, something more. And how. How do I do that? And if you recall, I started out the podcast by only interviewing people.

Betsy [00:02:02]:
I think it was maybe like, I want to say like my 1st 47 episodes maybe where I just interviewed people and I knew that I had a message, but it was like I had to warm up to the idea that it was okay to share my message and not just, not just like propel other people’s messages forward. Right? I could do both. Now I do both. But when I look back at that time, it was very much like a. I’m a little afraid. I’m a little afraid to show up, which is why today’s episode sort of feels so full circle for me. And I want to dive in and talk about this just a little bit. But, you know, over the past year since, I have been less consistent, honestly, if I’m being honest here on the show, because I’ve been so incredibly busy, and I don’t say busy as like a badge of honor.

Betsy [00:02:58]:
I was overwhelmed in a lot of ways. I had so many things going on that I really had to be able to say, say no to things, which in a lot of ways was a new thing for me. You know, people would ask me to come on summits or to be on their podcast or whatever, and I was like, if I can’t take care of my own stuff, then I can’t do more stuff I can’t add. And one of my very top priorities was making sure that I was taking care of myself, right. And I think that we do this a lot where we get a really busy or in a good way. Like, it was all good busy. Like, I am not complaining about it. Bring it on.

Betsy [00:03:39]:
But we. We then put all of our own stuff aside, right? We’re like, well, I don’t need as much sleep, or I don’t need to worry about that, or I don’t have to get together with friends. I’ll just work that night. And there was little parts where I noticed I was starting to do that, and I had to be really careful so that I created space for myself. So, like, as I look back over the last year, there has been probably more growth for me in the past year than ever in my life. There has been so many new things than ever in my life, and it’s been really, really incredible. And it’s also done something that I want to talk about. So when I started this podcast, for the first, like, 50 ish episodes, I only interviewed other people.

Betsy [00:04:28]:
There was a fear, I think maybe an underlying fear of being seen, right? Of visibility. And you might have that, too, in your life, where maybe it’s not that you have a podcast, although maybe it is, but it may be that I want to put myself out there or I want to build my business. Maybe you have a brick and mortar business, or maybe you have an online business like I do. I’ve had both. And I have seen this pattern, which was totally unconscious to me, I’m going to point out, and now it’s conscious. But I have had this pattern where the amount of visibility that I get, whether it’s in my local community or online, starts to make me shrink a little bit. And I’ve talked about this on the podcast over the years. I’ll call it, like a vulnerability hangover, which I think is maybe a Brene Brown coined phrase.

Betsy [00:05:19]:
But I would do a podcast, even. And then the next day I would feel like. Like, oh, did I share too much? Did I tell too much? Which I don’t think that’s true, but that’s what my brain was doing, right? My brain. I cannot tell you how many times I have woken up in the middle of the night to go in and unschedule a podcast, only to wake up and get going in the day and then be like, there was no reason for me to unschedule this and then post it live, you know? So sometimes if you don’t get a podcast till noon, historically, that might have been why, which was always a. I think I sort of dismissed it or ignored it or thought, I don’t know. You know, who knows? Who knows? And I don’t think this is an unusual thing, but I do think it’s interesting to me because one of the things that I do is I make the unconscious conscious. That’s one of the things that I do with clients. I can’t tell you every single day when I work with clients, they’re like, oh, my God.

Betsy [00:06:29]:
I didn’t even realize that. Like, holy smokes. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. But it’s really hard to do that for yourself. Which is why I have a coach of my own, many coaches. In fact, I’m going to tell you about what I’m doing. But many coaches, I spend an extraordinary amount of money every year on coaching because I truly believe that it’s that important, and I believe that my message is really important. And so in order to support me, to get my message out, then I need to hire that support.

Betsy [00:07:07]:
This is why it’s been really interesting to me, because now as I look back, I’m like, it was so obvious. Even when I had the brick and mortar business, it was obvious that there was a visibility, I’m gonna say, issue, but a sensitivity, let’s say a sensitivity where if I felt like too many people were seeing me or there was too much exposure, the risk of being misunderstood for me was really debilitating. And, you know, with all of us, these patterns like that, that pattern of limiting myself, if I felt like I was being too visible, that was absolutely a safety mechanism. Like, my brain thinks it’s helping me. It thinks that it is doing the absolute right thing. It doesn’t understand or know that consciously. I really want to be seen. Consciously.

Betsy [00:08:06]:
I really want my message getting out there. The work that we do inside the navigate method it changes people’s lives forever. I know this to the tips of my toes, and I will say one of the ways that I also know this for sure is that we just launched, if people go through the navigate method, we launched a secondary program for them just to stay in, to be able to continue to get support. And people are signing up for that like crazy. So I know that the navigate method changed their lives because otherwise they wouldn’t entertain doing more work with us. Right. So even though I know that consciously and in my bones, like unconsciously, I know that too, my unconscious mind thinks I that it’s helping me by limiting my visibility so that I don’t get misunderstood, overexposed, whatever it is. So all of these patterns tend to go back to when we were young.

Betsy [00:09:11]:
You know, when I was young, it was really important that I protect myself from being misunderstood. And you’ve probably heard me talk about this before, but, you know, after my mom died and my dad got remarried and I felt constantly misunderstood. And that was dangerous for me at that time in my life. And it wasn’t until I became an adult and could make my own decisions and could like, sort of unhook from that experience that I was able to start to create new patterns and support myself in new ways. But that old, like, string of you could be misunderstood. Like, that’s the core root. And it took me a lot of work to get to this core root, but when I got this, this fear of being misunderstood, because that could be dangerous. So my brain is working really hard to help me stay hidden, which is the exact opposite of what my conscious mind wants to do, right.

Betsy [00:10:13]:
And we do this in different areas of our life. I really was getting to the point where I was noticing I didn’t want to post on social media, which if you know me or you’ve been here for a long time, if you’ve been here for a long time, you know me, right? And that’s not really what I want. It’s not really my personality, but there’s something in my brain that says that is a level of safety that I have to continue. And so when I really started noticing my actions. So here’s what I want to offer you as we kind of finish talking about this. But I know what’s going on in my unconscious mind when I look at my actions. I don’t have to necessarily examine, like, I don’t have to what’s happened, like, I don’t have to. But if I look at my actions and my actions are not what I want then there’s something unconscious that’s stopping me.

Betsy [00:11:09]:
There’s something unconscious that’s keeping me in this pattern. It thinks this is helpful. And so I realized I wasn’t wanting to post online or I was only posting, like, to my feed. I’m good about my stories. I like my stories. Feels a little safer. Maybe they disappear after 24 hours, right? That could be it, perhaps. But also, there’s a lot more visibility if I post on my feed, right? There is a possibility that millions of people can see something that I post on my feed, but chances are it’s just a couple thousand people that see something on my stories.

Betsy [00:11:43]:
So it’s a way to keep myself small. And so when I noticed I didn’t want to post on my feed and I even talked to a girlfriend about this and she was like, post, post right now. And I was like, I feel physically like I can’t. And here’s how that fear starts to show up for me. And I want to offer this because you may have something like this in your life, too, but that showed up as confusion. And I’ve noticed this historically in my life. If something feels too risky to me, I am. I’m so smart.

Betsy [00:12:18]:
It’s not that I’m not smart enough, but it will show up as confusion because then I don’t trust myself and I don’t take action. So confusion’s really effective for me, for my brain to keep me stuck right where I am. And so when I noticed this pattern by noticing my actions where I was like, I’m doing this thing and I don’t really understand why. And so I knew I had to do something different, so I decided that this was something I was really going to take a hold of. And so I have a mindset coach that I work with a couple times a month, one on one, and I worked with her through it, I also have some other support through a group that I’m in, and I reached out to that mindset coach. Now, these mindset coaches that I have are literally some of the best in the world. And I don’t say that lightly. I’m saying that with absolute truth.

Betsy [00:13:17]:
These were the very top mindset coaches for Tony Robbins for years and years and years and years and years. Like, these are really high level and they helped me so much, and I realized that I needed to reprogram. So we really got to the heart of it, what I needed to reprogram. Now, you may have heard me talk on here before about, well, I’m a big fan of hypnosis I find hypnosis works really well for me. I have loved historically this app by my friend Joseph Klof that if you are in the app store on your iPhone and you type in hypnosis, I think it’s the first app that shows up. It’s got a j and a c on the little graphic, right? So it’s a white background and a blue JC. So Joseph is really an amazing hypnotherapist. And we went through a program together many, many, many years ago, and I think he’s just incredible.

Betsy [00:14:19]:
I find he. I think he lives in California now, but he’s got like a british accent or irish or something. I’m sorry. Somebody will listen to it and they’ll know exactly what it is. Let me know. I should message him on Facebook and ask, but I have used his app and I really love it. His app is free, but there’s also a paid version, and the paid version is not very expensive. I mean, I want to say it’s like $29 a year.

Betsy [00:14:43]:
And when you get the paid option, there is a little toggle that you can shift when you’re doing a hypnosis to put it on night. So if you’re doing through a hypnosis in the day, you just do it regular. But if you’re going to bed, you do it on night. And then instead of at the end, instead of like, 54321, wake up, you’re wide awake, well aware. Instead of that, it’s like, it lulls you off to sleep and you, I swear, like, it’s the best sleep of my, of my entire existence. And I find myself really craving doing his hypnosis. It’s not like, oh, I gotta do that. You know how sometimes we have things where we’re like, oh, I need to do that.

Betsy [00:15:24]:
I should probably be like, no. Like, I really like it. And sometimes I do them twice a day. Like, I really, really like them. I enjoy them. So anyway, I reached out to him and I was like, I need help. I gotta fix this thing. And so he is creating some custom hypnosis for me.

Betsy [00:15:39]:
So if you’ve been here for a long time, let’s. It’ll be, watch me, see what happens. I’m curious if you notice, I start showing up differently. He said it’s gonna take him a couple weeks to get it done, and then, you know, I’ll have to listen. I think I’ll probably start to notice a shift right away, but probably a couple weeks doing it every single day will get me where I need to go. But I think that this is going to be, like, a really big, big, huge shift for me. And if nothing else, a huge relief, because there’s pain behind that. You know, there’s suffering and remembering of really, really hard things that’s happening unconsciously in my mind every day that’s keeping me in a place out of unconscious fear.

Betsy [00:16:28]:
So how cool will it be to be able to eliminate that once and for all and to just feel really, really good? So now we’re, like, 16 minutes in, and I haven’t even really gotten to what I wanted to talk about, but that was. That still may be helpful to you. So here’s a quote that I saw that I kind of wanted to just talk about and just riff about this quote. So I saw this quote the other day, and I actually wrote it down. So the quote is, life is always moving in the direction of your strongest thought. And now that I’m reading that out loud to you, it’s kind of fascinating how our unconscious minds work. But my story I just told you, feeds right into this. Life is always moving in the direction of your strongest thought.

Betsy [00:17:13]:
When I read this, I was like, it’s not necessarily your strongest conscious thought, it’s your strongest unconscious thought. Right. Because my life is moving in a direction. Absolutely. There’s a conscious component to it, but I was stopping myself from where I really wanted to go. And, you know, I think we do this. This is a human thing to do. It means our brains are working really well.

Betsy [00:17:40]:
We create patterns and habits to support us. And so there may be times where early on, let’s just say in a relationship that you had early on, something happened and you needed to emotionally protect yourself. Whether that protection was conscious or unconscious, you created a pattern in order to protect yourself. So here’s what this looks like in real life. So you’re in the kitchen, and you see that your husband has left his cups on the countertop, like, just mere inches from the opening to the dishwasher, but hasn’t put them in. And you feel this, like, rage, right, where you feel so mad. And so if you looked at just that instance, like, if you just looked at that the cups are on the countertop, does the amount of emotion you feel about it match the actual instance, separating the instance from everything else going on in your life, right. Or anything that’s ever happened? Probably not, right? It’s probably the rage that you have probably doesn’t match.

Betsy [00:19:04]:
We see this all the time, like with road rage. Right? Somebody cuts you off, and you, like, lose your mind, you go bananas. But it’s not because they just like waded into your lane. It’s because it gave a exhaust valve like a steam release for all the anger that you’ve ever felt about anytime anybody’s cut you off or anything you ever felt about somebody that didn’t take you into account, or anytime that somebody didn’t see you for who you were, or anytime somebody dismissed you, right? And then all of a sudden that becomes like the release valve. It makes a lot of sense. Like, we’ve got to have a place for this, and we don’t have, typically, we don’t have a way to expel stress in the moment when it happens. Like we see animals, right? Something happens. They opossums walking down the pathway and a fox comes up.

Betsy [00:20:02]:
The opossum immediately plays dead. The snot, the fox sniffs around and then walks away. And once the fox is away, the possum has a physical reaction. They move their arms and legs like crazy, kind of like they were running like in the air, dismissing all of that stress in their body. And then they just get up and, well, wander away. They don’t carry it around. We don’t necessarily have a way to get rid of that stress. When instances happen, I teach women inside the navigate method how to do that because I think it’s super important and it’s a practice you can do every day.

Betsy [00:20:44]:
But if you don’t have that, then it’s building up. So now you see the glasses on the edge of the dishwasher and the story, the pattern, the protective pattern that you have is like, you don’t think. You don’t think I’m good enough or all the times where somebody dismissed you or thought you weren’t good enough or made you do stuff that wasn’t your job or whatever it is. And then you react to that. Maybe you say something sharp, right? Maybe you’re just exhausted. You roll your eyes, you slam the door. Maybe they’re gone and you just heckle them in the air, right? Like you just, why’d you do this? Now, you may think that that’s just an instance, and although it is in a lot of ways, it only is if you dispel all the stress around it and move past it in a way that you don’t carry it forward. So life is always moving in the direction of your strongest thought.

Betsy [00:21:45]:
Well, emotions create a lot of strength in our thoughts. You know, lots of times I hear people talk about affirmations and I love me a good affirmation. Like, I’m not saying don’t do affirmations, but I think affirmations are a really good way to refine or to help support deeper change, right? Because if I’m saying like, that I’m, everybody loves me and life is great, and it’s safe for me to have visibility or whatever my affirmation is, but unconscious, my unconscious story, the way that my life is actually moving, is in the direction of my strongest thought. And if that is not my strongest thought, so how do I add strength to thoughts? One can be repetition. So if you do have a mantra and you have been repeating it for years, you probably do believe it. I have one. Life is always working out for me. I really believe that one.

Betsy [00:22:41]:
And when things go sideways, I can still hold that belief. That’s how I know it’s really true for me. But I also can create a lot of strength with emotion. So I’m either moving in the direction that I want or I’m moving in a direction that I don’t want. And when I ignore those little situations, those little times where my truth is being shown, it’s showing me the direction of my strongest thought, then I’m not taking care, right? I’m not actually going where I want to go. I’m going in the direction of my strongest thought and emotion and repetition is going to create really strong, unconscious thoughts. And what happens when I’m not consciously thinking what I want to think? All my patterns and habits come into play, and that’s how I spend 95% of my life. So the place to create change isn’t consciously.

Betsy [00:23:39]:
I know that sounds kind of weird. There’s nothing wrong with conscious, like, go ahead and change consciously. I mean, go ahead and. Which would be your behavior and your environment, right? Go ahead and change those things. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that’s consciously only 95 or only 5% of how you live your life. The other 95% cannot be ignored. And if it is, then you’re gonna find yourself doing what I was doing, which was not posting on Instagram, not showing up on my Facebook group, not sending an email, not doing the things, the actions that I’d need to do.

Betsy [00:24:16]:
Because the moment I wasn’t consciously thinking about it and I had some relief, my pattern went into effect and kept me where I was. So we are always learning and growing. I will be forever on this path of learning and growing. You know, I say all the time when I do this show, it is lessons that I’m getting. Either I’ve had in my own life or that I’m in the middle of learning. And so this is just like a next level. So I’m super fascinated to see how things change for me. I’m thinking like by Christmas time I’ll really start seeing some big, huge shifts in outcomes, right? Because once we take action, then might take a minute for the universe to catch up and start to show me the outcomes that I’m looking.

Betsy [00:25:01]:
But it’s not going to be long because I’m really tackling it and I’m honestly putting my money where my mouth is. I am investing heavily in my own growth because I am the best bet out there. I will bet on myself more than anything else. And I say that with a lot of self love because it can be hard sometimes to think we’re worthy, especially when our families need things or our kids need things or whatever. But to say, you know what? I need something too. And this is what I’m going to do. And I think when we get to that place where we recognize that we deserve to get support for ourselves, you know, in whatever way that looks like, whether it’s hiring a coach or getting a friend and saying, hey, I want to read this book and go back and forth and try and figure out our patterns, you know? Doctor Joe Dispenza has some great books on shifting from that unconscious level. He uses meditation.

Betsy [00:26:04]:
Whether you get Joseph’s app, you know what I mean? Like, there’s so many different ways you can support yourself. And I think when you can begin to recognize that you’re worthy of that, that is how you live a big life. Thanks so much for being here with me this week. I love you guys so much and I will see you next time on the art of living big. Hey, thanks so much for listening to today’s show and thank you for sharing the show with your friends. I love when you guys do that. I appreciate it so much. And thank you for leaving me a review on iTunes.

Betsy [00:26:37]:
I know that it matters because when I go to find a podcast, I always look to see what the reviews are. So it really means a lot to me that you take a minute to, like, figure out how to even make that happen. Now, if you want to find me, find me on social media. I’m usually on Instagram starting out on TikTok. It’s just my name, Betsy Paik. And that’s my website, too, betsypake.com. and you can find out all about the work that I do, having me speak for an event that you might be helping to plan or getting trained inside my alchemy institute, but to make it really easy. If you want me, just shoot me a DM.

Betsy [00:27:13]:
Shoot me a direct message on Instagram and I will be at your service. Thanks again for listening, and I will see you all next week.